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    #76
    Who?

    Where to start?

    'The Poison Sky was just New Who by numbers again. Lazy. No suprises, no drama, and only one unconvincing moment of suspense. And as we were told in both episodes, the Sontarans have only one weakness - the probic vent in their neck. Oh and their armour can't withstand bullets. Make that two weaknesses then.

    That there have been worse episodes since the return, is more an indication of the series as a whole.

    battylad wrote:
    What's the back drop to Rose coming back - seen her twice now - I think. Next weeks looks like the big talking point, will be interested to hear how it all came about...
    Am I the only one not bothered about Rose? Companions come and then they go, and we never hear from them again, unless it's an anniversary. All it means is that the end of the series needs us to have characters we care about for some reason, and this is the easy way out. So RTD's written it again.

    And with Rose, we get her family, and if Martha's around we'll get her family. And Donna's too. Fan-fucking-tastic. The whole point of having the companions travel, is that they're getting away from everything. To see other times, other places, outer spaces (it's catching). The first time, with Rose it was fine, because as a one-off seeing how a companions family would react was different, it was interesting. Now it's all one half saying "there's only ever trouble when he's around, I wish you wouldn't go with him" and the other half saying "he's a good man, he'll look after you, go an enjoy yourself". It's dull, it's 2D, it's repetitive, and it adds the square root of fuck all.

    King Mob wrote:
    "I know it's science fiction in an alternative universe, but where was the Rattigan Academy supposed to be, exactly? At the top of Primrose Hill?"
    They always teleported in and out, so it didn't necessarily have to be in London. Hang on, silly me, what was I thinking?

    Ginger Yellow wrote:
    Yeah, the surprises point is definitely valid, although I'd quibble with his "cult of the story arc" analysis. He seems to be arguing from an assumption that perfect sci-fi should be like the Simpsons, where each episode stands on its own and has little if any impact on the continuity of the series. Obviously this allows for more "surprises" than series driven by story arcs, but it's far from the only means.
    The problem with Story Arcs is that they have to be good. 'The Key To Time' worked because it was almost incidental - apart from 'The Ribos Operation' each of the stories would have worked just as well without the fact they were after a segment. 'Bad Wolf' worked because it was also incidental in the end, yet 'Torchwood' and 'Vote Saxon' were a lot more ham-fisted. Also, 'The Key To Time' doesn't have any episodes that clearly look like they've been shoe-horned in, to give the arc and the series finale more meaning. So far, we've had 'The Long Game', 'Tooth And Claw', 'Rise Of The Cybermen', 'The Lazarus Experiment', 'The End Of The World', 'New Earth' and 'Gridlock' that have all, on reflection, just looked like setups to the end of the series, with a story tacked on afterwards. Arguably 'The Unquiet Dead', 'Boom Town' and 'Tooth and Claw' are similar setups for Torchwood, and 'School Reunion' for the Sarah Jane Adventures.

    And most of them were shit.

    I'd argue there's no need for a story arc, or a series finale in Who. So what if most American-made Sci-Fi uses it? British Sci-Fi has always been so different as to be a different genre. American TV has always been built towards big finishes and climaxes, and telling their audiences they need a short term attention span and a long term memory. British TV has always been geared to entertain people in a different way. Who has always stood and fallen on it's writing, but Cornell and Moffatt apart, it hasn't been consistant, but as long as it gets AI figures over 80, then nothing will change.

    The Lawrence Miles blog is great, with the obvious exception of his comments about Moffat. What is the deal there?

    Lawrence Miles wrote:
    It isn't just that the series is intent on flogging a formula we're already sick of, or that Doctor Who's capacity now appears to be more limited than at any point in its prior history, including the UNIT era. It isn't just the embarrassment factor of watching yet another TV newsreader announce the apocalypse while urgent-sounding music pumps away in the background, or the crushing banality of the "relationship" dialogue, or the way Helen Raynor keeps saying how nice it is that Doctor Who can combine "real world" with "alien" without noticing that the "real world" half of the programme is a spent force and that the "alien" half is rapidly becoming too routine to seem worthwhile.
    The UNIT-era was probably my least favourite of the old series too. The variety this time is in the newsreader. Kirsty Wark this time. And you still think Dawkins is going to have anything but a cameo role this time?

    Lawrence Miles wrote:
    Looking back on it, the clue was there two whole years ago, in the Confidential that accompanied "The Girl in the Fireplace". You may recall an interview with Julie Gardner, in which she expressed her surprise that a script which begins with monsters on eighteenth-century Earth should then cut to a space-station in the fifty-first century, and said that this clearly wasn't business as usual. Now, this puzzled me at the time. Since Doctor Who is capable of going anywhere, anywhen and anyhow, and has the ability to change its methods with every episode, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I consider a time-shift between the 1700s and the 5000s to be pretty much par for the course. At the very least, it's no big deal. Yet as far as the programme-makers are concerned, standard practice is to (A) find a historical setting or a modern-day "topical" issue, (B) attach a monster to it, and (C) arrange the set-pieces around the result. To me, a script that stretches our attention between Mme de Pompadour and clockwork droids in the far future is surprising, but it's only a background-radiation level of surprise. To a producer who doesn't even realise that surprise is a minimum expectation, on the other hand… yes, it must seem spectacular.
    I rarely watch Confidential, but the clue I got was about a year later, when RTD said that he'd given Helen Raynor the brief of Daleks in Manhattan, and he figured it would be a great excuse for glamour and glitz, and that he was suprised and almost disappointed that she'd come back with a story set during the depression. As much as there are concerning similarities between RTD and JNT (most notably shoehorning famous names into the show, regarless of their ability to act, or even their suitability in the role), he would deliver the darker episodes.

    I'm also concerned about next week's. 'The Doctor's Daughter'. That's fine, I can live with that. She looks a lot younger than Susan, but hopefully she's regenerated and a timelord, rather than something dull like a clone or crafted using a mixture of his DNA with someone elses. RTD has promised it will reveal something big about the Doctor's past. That's fine as long as it makes sense. He has, however says that it will piss off the fanboys. Which suggests that a) it won't make sense and b) that RTD has let the success go to his head, and is arrogant enough to set out to alienate the most hardcore of the fanbase. That sort of thing tends to be the undoing of people. Hopefully, he won't take the show with him.

    Comment


      #77
      Who?

      Lots there to chew on, PD, and if I wasn't about to leave for a couple of days away, I'd weigh in. Nice to see the thread has sparked into life, though.

      Comment


        #78
        Who?

        One odd thing I've just remembered from Saturday's, is that bit in the UNIT bunker they're confirming all the countries that are going to fire nuclear missiles at the Sontarans- "North America online! Britain online! France online! India online! Pakistan online! North Korea online!"

        So did Israel cut a deal with the Sontarans in the first epsiode or something?

        Comment


          #79
          Who?

          "I'd argue there's no need for a story arc, or a series finale in Who."

          Well that's a different matter. Who is obviously supremely well suited to episodic structure, what with the whole go-anywhere-in-space-and-time-at-whim thing. I wouldn't disagree with you there.

          But Miles seemed to be extending it to the whole of sci-fi. The mentions of BSG and Buffy were particularly baffling given that BSG is clearly made stronger by its story arc while Buffy occasionally suffers from it in individual episodes but wouldn't be half the show it is without it. I'd argue you'd have fewer "surprises" as Miles uses the word in Buffy without an arc.

          I noticed the Israel nuke thing too. More fodder for the nutters.

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            #80
            Who?

            Yeah, Israel. And they missed out China too, though they're obviously not as important.

            And Russia.

            Comment


              #81
              Who?

              Um, China is in the list, if you go back and listen. Russia isn't, it's true, which I managed to miss at the time. Even more odd. Have I forgotten some plot point in New Who that would explain why the world's second largest nuclear arsenal isn't being used?

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                #82
                Who?

                Israel's nuclear weapons are apparently "undeclared", so when they were rung up by UNIT about the Sontarans they probably just said "Nuclear weapons? We should be so lucky."

                The North Koreans, on the other hand, seem to have been surprisingly cooperative.

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                  #83
                  Who?

                  Have I forgotten some plot point in New Who that would explain why the world's second largest nuclear arsenal isn't being used?
                  Everyone in Russia is a wolf of Abo-Fenran?

                  Comment


                    #84
                    Who?

                    To my enormous surprise I thought that was excellent. Every single one of the regulars gave what was probably their best performance yet. The script made me laugh and cry and the baddy sounded just enough like Ian Paisley for it to have been deliberate.

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                      #85
                      Who?

                      Oh, yes, that's a lot more like it. It started off looking like an updated 'Face of Evil', but ended up being a lot, lot more. Great little digs at the Troubles, Creationsim and Religion in general.

                      Echoes of the TV Movie at the end, where Jenny dies and comes back to life the same way as the Doctor does. I take it this means another spinoff series?

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                        #86
                        Who?

                        Yeah, I couldn't help but ponder what's going to follow Jenny's "regeneration", especially as she flies off a super-cool sports spaceship. A spin-off, probably for kids' TV(*), looks a nailed-on certainty to me. I did think for one surreal moment that Jenny would regenerate and become Rose, but that would have been too much, I guess ...

                        (*because the main Doctor Who isn't Kids' TV. Oh no.)

                        Was I the only one who recognised the actor playing the baddy? It was distinguished thesp Nigel Terry. I don't think he's done anything on the screen since the role I know him for - playing the most authentically West Country King Arthur of all time in Excalibur .

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                          #87
                          Who?

                          I enjoyed that as well. I'm beginning to think that the better stories are the ones that stay away from contemporary earth.

                          Comment


                            #88
                            Who?

                            Now there's an idea. Quick, call the production office.

                            An exceptionally good episode. Intrigue, humour, plot twists and a genuine sense of escalating tension. It was pleasantly exhilarating to be excited by, rather than ashamed of, a story for the first time in awhile.

                            Comment


                              #89
                              Who?

                              I think I may be the lone dissenting voice, but that was distinctly ordinary. Better than the last couple, but not one of the highs of recent series'.

                              They barely scratched the surface of the parent/child relationship (on either side), which is not surprising if you're also trying to fit in a normal episode's worth of action, but it just left all of the characters feeling like sketches. The Doctor and his grieving for lost children, Martha and her bottle-faced dolphin friend, the two-dimensional Jenny character and what felt like a rushed plot that could've been more fleshed-out as well. I mean, I still enjoyed it, but it was too busy and pulling in too many directions.

                              Comment


                                #90
                                Who?

                                The were alot of avenues left unexplored, which is understandable given that Jenny was only one thread in a story already struggling to tell itself in 42 minutes.

                                For one thing, the Doctor seemed to accept quite glibly that a pseudo-Time Lord had been created from his own DNA. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if he'd seen the clone as a freak of science that shouldn't have been allowed to survive, and spent the episode trying to destroy it.

                                Clearly, if this had have been an old-fashioned four-parter, episode one would have ended on Jenny's emergence from the cloning machine (a cloning machine which presumably still contains the Doctor's DNA sample and could churn out more Time Lord clones if necessary).

                                Comment


                                  #91
                                  Who?

                                  I'm kind of with Crusoe. I kept feeling it should have enjoyed it more than I did, but it kept being held back by silly little things: the crappy guns with enormous muzzle flash but next to no damage; the idea that there would be nobody who survived for seven days; despite the shortage of deaths during combat scenes; the fact that Jenny looked and sounded exactly like one of my former colleagues; the whole quicksand scene. Then there was the obligatory OFFS plot hole - the idea that you could break open a container with enough methane, ammonia and other chemicals to terraform a planet in an enclosed space and not asphyxiate.

                                  Comment


                                    #92
                                    Who?

                                    Well, you know, sometimes if you pick at the threads of a story it will unravel pretty quickly (and Larry Miles, in lieu of having anything more constructive to say this week, does just that), but the whole seems more than the sum of the parts. I couldn't help but be swept along by it.

                                    If anyone has good reason to dislike this story, surely it must be Liz Sladen.

                                    Comment


                                      #93
                                      Who?

                                      I'm totally with Crusoe. It was deeply ordinary and riddled with holes.

                                      Comment


                                        #94
                                        Who?

                                        Tonight's so far has been so self-indulgent it's wallowing in it's own shit.

                                        I'm sorry, but if we wanted a "Doctor Who meets Agatha Christie" comedy, do it as a Comic Relief Special, for fuck's sake.

                                        My daughters have just asked to go to bed. Unprecedented.

                                        Daleks, the Master ... come on.

                                        Comment


                                          #95
                                          Who?

                                          Yeah, it was terrible. Excruciatingly bad. Didn't convince for a second. And I hate all the "we're so clever" crappy jokes they keep putting in in the historical episodes. Murder at the Vicar's Rage - bloody hell. It pulls you straight out of the story each time they put one of those in...

                                          Still think the Ood one was the best of a bad series so far.

                                          P.S. Agree with Crusoe, Horse and GY about last week's episode too.

                                          Comment


                                            #96
                                            Who?

                                            Oh, that was poor - only bit that made me laugh (and I know I shouldn't have) was the ginger beer joke.

                                            Comment


                                              #97
                                              Who?

                                              If the comeback season in 2005 had been anywhere near as bad as this, the show wouldn't still be on the air.

                                              Comment


                                                #98
                                                Who?

                                                I thought it was okay, rather than bad. Maybe that's because I compared it to Roberts' previous effort - The Shakespeare Code. You know the one where the Doctor and his companion go back in time, meet a famous writer, portrayed as a genuis, and keep referencing the works that they haven't done yet, and use the writers mindset to help defeat the winged baddie? At least this time, it wasn't as subtle as a brick, Christie was portrayed a lot more realistically than Shakespeare, and there were a couple of jokes in there. Not enough to label it as a comedy (and like VTT, I laughed once, same sort of time).

                                                Roberts seemed to suggest that Christie's longevity, and book sales was proof that she was a good writer, which almost encapsulates the shallowness of New Who. Don't forget had Shakespeare quoting JK Rowling in the last series.

                                                It just seems that RTD knows that The Doctor can travel back in time, so we have to go to the past. Now, in the old series, (Hartnell era apart, which was about using the historicals to educate), when the series went back, they went back to events, to times, not to people. And when they went to people, rather than times, it was an unmitigated disaster (Timelash, anyone), or it was kept short, and essential to the plot (The King's Demons). The likes of Talons Of Weng Chiang and Pyramids Of Mars worked, because there was no personality. If RTD had commissioned Roberts to write The Visitation, it would have been all about Samuel Pepys.

                                                Using major historical characters is hard, because they have to be written well, played by convincing actos, and used realistically in terms of the plot. RTD has to use Queen Victora (badly), Roberts uses Shakespeare knuckle-chewingly badly. Only The Unquiet Dead and those stories written by Cornell and Moffatt have have dealt with the past well. TUD because Simon Callow is the biggest Dickens fan alive and a perfectionist, and Cornell and Moffatt because they've either avoided the Cult of Personality or used a minor character from history. Oh, and they're fucking great writers who understand the show.

                                                Oh, and after their best performances so far last week, Tennant and Tate his lows for their respective characters.

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                                                  #99
                                                  Who?

                                                  At least it's Stephen Moffat for the next two weeks, eh? Hopefully it will be up to his usual standard.

                                                  Who wrote the episodes in the last series where the Doctor was a teacher in an early 20th century school btw? And have they written any other episodes? (Those were my favourite of all the non-Moffat episodes since Dr Who returned.)

                                                  Comment


                                                    Who?

                                                    I thought the first ten or fifteen minutes last night were qute promising. Like they were trying to do a version of the Tom'n'Lalla runarounds. But, my, didn't it all get very boring very quickly?

                                                    And Jimski - Human Nature was written by Paul Cornell who also wrote Father's Day from the first series. He's very good.

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